The Question Board
I put off telling Franklin Todd what my search had turned up. The trail of the sure-to-be-famous youth ended abruptly, dying out in the middle of 1958. Thumbnail biographies and professional references both dried up. A void lay between the boy of twenty-five, in the middle of the fastest-breaking biological revolution ever, and the man twice that age, an obscure computer functionary. I could do nothing but confirm the same enigma that had driven Todd to consult me in the first place. I returned to that hauntingly alien photo, "one of the new breed who will help uncover the formula—" The article bore an epigraph by Friedrich Miescher, the twenty-five-year-old who had discovered DNA in 1869:
Should one ask anybody who is undertaking a major project in science, in the heat of the fight, what drives and pushes him so relentlessly, he will never think of an external goal; it is the passion of the hunter and the soldier… the stimulus of the fight with its setbacks.
One passionate hunter had evidently been shot along the way. I would have gone on trying to determine how, even had Todd not returned. Some days after my break, I caught him hanging around the Question Board, scouring it as if nothing mattered except this discontinuous glut of fact stripped of context. As if, despite the biblical promise, the world would end in flood after all. Of information. If Todd lay in wait for me, he made no sign. "Truly amazing," he said, not even looking as I approached. "How'd you find all this stuff? You make it up?"
It distressed me to enjoy seeing him. I tried to pull my mouth out of its involuntary grin into disapproval. "Of course not. What do you take me for? This is human services. Not for profit. Bulk mail permit."
"This one, for instance." He pointed to the weeks-old question about where in the world people were best off. The outdated card was due to be removed; I took it down as Mr. Todd continued. "How did you know all that, about the two million tons of bird shit and disappearing roads and all?"
My M.L.S. cheekbones crumpled like a rear-ended economy car. "Nauru? Nauru is a reference librarian's mainstay. Smallest republic. Largest per capita income. Typical instance of List Mentality. You might as well ask any urban male over fourteen if the number three sixty-seven means anything to him." Cobb's average, which I verified every few months, meant nothing to Todd. He looked inquisitively at me, not yet daring to ask if I had results. I wasn't volunteering. I carried on with my work, pinning to the board the Q-and-A:
Q: Who is the head of the CIA and where can I reach him? This is an EXTREMELY confidential matter.
F.P. 7/3/83
A: William J. Casey, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC 20505.
J. O'D., 7/5/83
Todd took two more cards from under my clasped arm, careful not to touch my side. He assisted, pinning the cards into place. It seemed we had worked together, easily and quietly, for years.
Q: What must we do to be saved?
C.R., 7/2/83
A: A tough one, but worth looking into. According to George Saville, Marquis of Halifax (1633–1695), in A Rough Draft of a New Model at Sea, "To the question, What shall we do to be saved in this World? there is no other answer but this, Look to your Moat."
J. O'D., 7/5/83
My new acquaintance examined our handiwork. He giggled at the first and took undisguised pleasure in the second. Then he looked at me, scrutinized my face, trying to determine exactly who worked this advice column for the fact-lorn public. "You've found something," he declared. "That much is clear."
I wanted to contradict him, but couldn't. "Like the Canadian Mounties…" I began, but caught myself before ending up in the double entendre.
"You'll have to tell me everything. Listen: turns out I'm the sole patron of a seafood dive very much ahead of its time." His burlesque was gentle, with no sadistic edge. "I'm particularly enthusiastic about their humane handling of shellfish. Want to do lunch?"
It felt good to be asked a question that didn't require a double-check. I laughed. "It's almost five o'clock."
"Almost time for night-shift breakfast. I thought lunch might be an acceptable compromise."
"You cannot have seafood for breakfast. I forbid it."
"I've done worse. Can we take that no as a yes?" He went on, with wondrous, unassisted certainty, to set the time and place, not to mention what I would be eating. He rubbed his hands and made a curious snapping flick with thumb and middle finger. I later learned how many different things that nervous gesture stood for. "All right then. Meet you there. I assume you are dependable, Ms.
O'Deigh?" My paranoia flared as I heard my name in his mouth. "You'll be there?" Urgent but decorous library subdecibel. "Ach, she'll be thare, laddie. Stop with yare wurryin'."
All that I know of animal courtship dances comes from Van Nostrand's. But this clearly was one; too much bravado and flutter to be anything else. No man had done me so elaborate a two-step in several seasons, and I let it go on, despite myself. Pure, amateur male theatrics: nothing to take seriously. While ambivalent about meeting the man outside the jurisdiction of the shelf list, I saw little danger in it. Capitulation was easier than trying to outtalk him. My own curiosity about the collapse of the precocious empiricist would have been enough to take Todd on. I wanted everything his colleague might tell me.
But Franklin Todd's soft-shoe polish also smelled of something else: aromatic locales I hadn't yet visited, the scent of travel. The man was genuinely strange. Two people, no longer young, knowing nothing about one another, their pasts sharing no word in common, meet on a day in early summer to compare notes on a third party. The scenario had all the charm of travelers' phrases, a crash course at Berlitz. Sardonic, innocent, Todd backpedaled from the Question Board. He stopped abruptly and retraced his steps. He looked me over a last time and said, "But you are." Contradicting all advance reports, yet firm in the face of the evidence.
"Am what? What am I?"
"You are looking after your moat, aren't you?" He'd meant something else, an answer to his own question of a week before, deciding that I was, after all, possessed of surfaces. And the decision surprised us both. Still pruning the board after he left, I found an impeccable imitation of one of my own typed cards hiding amid the others, one of those marvelous walking sticks or owl-imitating moths. The impostor-card asked, "Q: What is the origin of the phrase 'Make the catch'?" It had not been there before Mr. Todd's visit.
Persistence of Vision
At the time, I was not in the market for dance steps, however novel. Already involved, as contemporary idiom puts it, tied to a man in a mutually professional windbreak stable enough to deflect this new sea breeze. Stavine toeether for four vears Droved our complementarity. Keith — slick, quick to anger, addicted to excitement, at times insane — countered my own reverse extremes. Together, we passed in our class and era, subtly matched opposites in a country full of couples as incongruous as Tuckwell-O'Deigh.
Keithy always made me laugh. The problem, by summer of '83, was that I'd begun laughing at his running routine despite myself. My mate's particular brand of joke had lost the redeeming secret: the trick of making disparate reality show a hopeless, bearable seam. Like everyone I know in New York, Tuckwell was a prairie refugee. Every damn person I get close to in this city — all transplanted Hoosiers or huskers. It would have been cheaper to stay home. Keith's dress, speech, and manner were compensatory— Coastier Than Thou. He could speak convincingly about everything on the island from P/E ratios to performance art. "Appraising, dear heart, doesn't necessarily require the inconvenience of knowing."